HS: What happened to us that we need some form of deep psychosomatic healing such as orgone therapy?

PD: We were damaged as children. Just as our parents were damaged before us. As a result we sense that something is missing inside us. We sense that we are not what we should be. We sense that there is something locked up inside us which desparately wants to get out. Of course, we have to be in crisis to admit this. Isn't this true?

We use excessive alcohol, sex, religion, violence, gambling and every imaginable force to try to free ourselves from this constant, often secret oppression. But generally, even more pain and suffering is the result of our fight against our oppression. This pain results from not knowing how to work on ourselves. A skilled orgone therapist can show us how to work successfully.

HS: And all this started when we were children?

PD: When we were very young, perhaps still in the womb, events occurred to us which caused our body to freeze up, we stopped feeling natural emotions and our minds became locked, so that now, as adults, we simply cannot think clearly. We cannot act naturally. Dr. Reich referred to this process as neuromuscular armoring.

Neuromuscular armoring is functionally identical with a subtle dysfunction in our total organic system. That process began when we were tiny children and unless corrected prevents us from ever becoming full adults. Ever. The proof is all the senseless violence, greed and misery we see.

HS: Some would argue that humans are inherently bad, destructive and violent. What do you think?

PD: Reich showed that this is not true. This condition, this apparent evil is the result of the armoring against life that starts in us, as I said, when we are very small.

Many individuals who come to this web site are already painfully aware of this process. He or she may have tried many, many things to try to free himself.

HS: But what specifically happens to the small child that shuts him or her down so completely?

PD: The main process looks something like this. The child goes mom or dad to express himself emotionally and creatively; say, he or she makes a painting during the Christmas get together with the grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, etc.

The child runs in delight of his accomplishment to his mother or father. Instead of joy and warm arms from the parent, the child is scolded, "Do not run in the house and do not interrupt me! And take that THING away and dispose of it. It's time for dinner!" (Of course, not all parents do this. But unfortunately most do.)

This happens because the child's parents are already emotionally stressed and distorted due to their own armoring. They are no longer natural, healthy, mature human beings. The parents pass this distortion on to their child.

HS: I remember that very event happening to me, only I worked all day carving a horse and the tail broke off.

PD: When this type of thing happens to a small child he or she feels betrayed by his "gods" (parents) and his spirit is broken. His response is generally one of tears and rage. And he or she may be punished for this too!

He or she then neurologically associates his creations and natural impulses with rejection or even punishment, and his little body tightens up and can no longer feel or express itself as it would naturally.

The real problem is that these incidents become repressed from memory, physically frozen into the body, emotional life and mind in the form of this neuromuscular armoring. And the child begins, literally, to shrink away from life. Unfortunately these incidents with parents and others occur again and again and again.

HS: So is it as if the child becomes locked up like this for the rest of his life?

PD: Yes. And worse. Because of the nature of the armoring process the child, even as an adult, is NOT aware of what happened to him. He doesn't know that he or she is no longer a natural human being! He has been "knocked into unconsciousness" as far as his natural emotional states and mental powers go, and generally behaves in a very, very restricted manner for the rest of his life.

HS: It sounds very scary, almost like a science fiction book I read years ago where this master race invaded Earth, and instead of fighting a war with the people of Earth just put them all into a hypnotic trance so that they were peaceful and had no idea they were now mindless slaves.

PD: And, of course, their real lives were essentially over at that point!